RadioBanter - FT 1000 MP - Need your opinions

Hi there,

hope you all had a great CQWW contest - we at DF1LX certainly did and worked
a couple of the regulars from this newsgroup as well. Doug even comes back
when addressed with his name and not his callsign ,-)

I wonder what your experience with the FT-1000MP is, which is the rig we
used during the contest. This was a first for us, so far we have used a
trusty FT-990 for that.

To be quite honest: I found the FT-1000MP a dreadful rig for CW in many
respects:

- The side tone is ugly and hums badly
- QSK simply sucks, both in terms of signal quality (clips) and audio
quality.
- As soon as you got more than three stations calling with signals above
559, the receiver sound completely overloaded and produces a
non-distinguishable signal mess.

Let me try to explain the last part:

On my trusty TS930 ist is easily possible to have a wall of 20 or 30 really
loud stations and yet be able to pull out a really weak one that somehow
manages to not zero-beat on any of the big signals. On the FT-1000, however,
this is flat out impossible; what you hear is a porridge-like mess of audio
with no chance of pulling out weak ones. We tried all combinations of
filters (this particular FT-1000MP is completely loaded with INRAD-filters),
DSP, notching, shifting etc., but the result was the same.

Given that four operators had exactly the same feeling I am curious to
learn what other operators have to say about it, in particular operators
with some pile up or contest experience.

How do you manage in pile-ups? Seriously, the thought of spending hour after
hour on working a pile up with this rig simply gives me a headache, whereas
the thought of doing the same thing with my trusty 930 merely makes me want
to have even more pile ups.

I had actually planned to go shopping for a new rig, but after that contest
I feel that my money is a lot better spent on getting the 500 Hz-INRAD
filter for my TS930 and add the PIEXX digital board upgrade which makes the
rig computer controllable.

Any comments?

Peter Lemken
DF5JT
Berlin

ObContestPeeve: CT by K1EA is a great piece of software that does anything a
contester needs. I only wish someone had instructed Ken on usability. Next
contest will be done with TLF, the free Linux-clone of TRLog. No more
network CRC-errors, lost QSOs, and weird keyboard functions. It's been nice
to work with CT for more than 10 years, but it's definitely time to move on
to something better.

--
There's a remote exploit it in the free market, whereby you can boot the
price of something by talking crap. It was reported to Bugtraq yesterday,
and I'd post a link to bugzilla.nyse.ftc.gov, but they don't allow links
from slashdot. -- http://www.petitiononline.com/nosco/petition.html